“Some of these stories are closer to my own life than others are, but not one of them is as close as people seem to think.” Alice Murno, from the intro to Moons of Jupiter

"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see." Arthur Schopenhauer

“Why does everything you know, and everything you’ve learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too. Show me where it says, in the Bible, ‘Purgatory.’ Show me where it says ‘relics, monks, nuns.’ Show me where it says ‘Pope.’” –Thomas Cromwell imagines asking Thomas More—Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Saturday, September 30, 2017

The Hekura Healer of Inherited Wounds: He Borara Chapter 13

Bahikoawa’s
real name is Mobaräkäwa. Nakaweshimi, she of the
hirsute labia and the missing infant, is Rariwi. The boy who gave him his first
glimpse of the Yąnomamö wild glint is Warotobowä, and he sits with Lac, along
with a few Mömariböwei-teri men, going through the charts to see what can be
salvaged. The relationships are diagrammed correctly in most cases; it’s only
the names that are worthless. He has the names of many children and siohas
right too. Warotobowä says he’ll help Lac redo the entire census for one of
each of the main types of madohe: an aluminum pot, an ax, another machete,
fishhooks, a loincloth—apparently the Yąnomamö find the foreskin string as
uncomfortable as Lac did when he tried it—and a shotgun.

“Ma,
little brother,” Lac responded. “Pick one—and I’m not giving you a shotgun, you
or any other Yąnomamö. You’re too waiteri.” Now the light is softly fading into
night. Lac and the six young men from Bisaasi-teri will travel back tomorrow.
He’s decided to abandon his work, try to cobble together a serviceable PhD
thesis from what he’s already done, and inform Dr. Nelson that the task he set
him to is impossible. The Yąnomamö are too violent and cunning in their
enforcement of the name taboo.

Lac
knows he’s failed as an anthropologist, but this reality doesn’t cut as deep as
it might because the failure is as much anthropology’s as it is his own. Most
of the ethnographies produced by PhD candidates like him are based on stints in
the field not much longer than he’s been living in Bisaasi-teri. If he hadn’t
made it a point to travel to as many other villages as he could, he would never
have discovered the hoax his hosts had played on him, which makes you wonder,
he thinks, how much of that so-called data is total bunk.

It
would barely matter anyway. All these eager young white people set out
quixotically trying to expand our knowledge about the range of human experiences,
and they end up staying for six measly months with a long-conquered people,
missionized and corralled onto a reservation of one type or another. What can
we learn about human experience from that, other than that technologically
advanced societies don’t afford their primitive cousins much regard?

It’s
already too dark to do much more with the census tables. He imagines he’ll have
to toss the entire file for his genealogies into a fire and start from
scratch—if he ever decides they’re worth another crack that is. He tells the
boy they’re done for the night, gives him some fishhooks from the bottom of his
backpack, and sits down on the hammock he’s tied in the headman’s yahi. He
doesn’t want to close his eyes. Even though he’s given up on pretending to be
an anthropologist—given up on believing an anthropologist is something worth
pretending to be—he still feels the full weight of his guilt for interfering in
the raid on Patanowä-teri. Except, maybe interfering isn’t what he feels guilty
about; maybe it’s the brute fact that he got someone killed.

But that guy would’ve
killed you, he reminds himself; his buddy would have killed Rowahirawa.

So
self-defense is your defense? Ah, but what were you doing there in the first
place? That’s like saying you’re not responsible for wrecking a car because you
were drunk; the fact is, you’re responsible for getting drunk when you knew you’d
be climbing into the driver’s seat.

Lac closes his eyes at
last. Next he knows, he’s groping and flailing about in the mosquito netting to
keep from tumbling out of the hammock. Those powerful arms, holding him down,
rearing back to strike, and then…. The logic of him-or-me holds sway, the
principle people who’ve never set foot in a jungle like to call the law of the
jungle. All of civilization begins with an effort to change this fundamental
equation. Kill your neighbor? Why, when his family will avenge him? Why, when
you can profit from his labor, when you can make use of his products? Why, when
some authority would surely drop the hammer, seeing to it that, as a
consequence of your deed, you are somehow sanctioned, sacrificed, or elsewise
compromised to make your victim’s family whole? Absent an economy, absent a
protocol for meting out justice, absent an authority to execute on that
protocol, and we’re doomed to repeat this cycle of endless reprisal—tit for tat
in both gifts and offenses—unto eternity.

He
looks around the yahi. It’s silent and dark. It seems like he only nodded off
for a minute, but it could have been hours. As he lies rocking, his ears slowly
tune in to the skittering and scrapping of roaches and beetles in the roof
thatching above him, a sign that the Mömariböwei-teri will soon need to burn
this shabono and build a new one, either on this same spot or, if they wish to
avoid hostile neighbors, in some other more strategic location. From what Lac
has gleaned, shabonos grow too infested, their roofs too leaky, after a few
years. Rebuilding is a time of great excitement.

As
the swaying of his roughly jarred hammock dwindles peacefully into soft
juddering and then to stillness, Lac slides into an almost sublime state of
emptiness. Emptied of ideas and beliefs, of conceits and agendas, just an
intricate conglomerate of flesh sacks within flesh sacks, kept in business by a
central pump encased in a bone cage, mindlessly thudding away. The gooey mess
behind his eyes has been pushed beyond capacity, taken far outside the
parameters of its normal operation. Now it’s seized up, congealed, its contents
left to flake away, like dry leaves scattering in the breeze.

Whether
he’s here with the Yąnomamö or back home in Ann Arbor, it makes no difference.
In either place, he’ll merely be thudding out his existence while being jostled
and prodded about by other stuffed flesh dolls endowed with delusions of
selfhood and significance. He should rightly be mortified on returning to
Bisaasi-teri tomorrow evening, but he’s been the butt of their bullying jokes
ever since he arrived in the territory back in November. What’s one more
X-frame bridge, one more instance of failing to keep to a trail for more than
five minutes at a time, one more day of having to insist on being told about
topics even children are natural experts in?

Some of the elements of
those fake names he should have recognized—but then again English-speakers
hardly blink at the idea of a man named Dick. How could he have known?

No, he’ll go back. He’ll
give Mobaräkäwa a piece of his mind. If Clemens is there, he’ll tell him about
the Salesian plot to steal his dictionary. Then he’ll ask him to arrange
passage out of the territory, back to Caracas, back to Laura and the kids. If
Clemens isn’t there, then he’ll have to motor downstream to Ocamo, have the
padre get him on a flight from the dirt landing strip in La Esmeralda, a request
which will require a bit of lying if he hopes to have it granted: “It’s just for a couple
weeks, like the last time, and when I get back I’ll pick up that dictionary you
asked to borrow.” Then it’s back to the States, where he’ll eat lots of fresh
salad, drink lots of cold beer, and take up showering every day again.

He falls asleep to the
sputtering of embers in the hearth, a faint smile stretching his briefly
contented lips.

*****

Lac doesn’t trust Warotobowä
any farther than he can throw him, not because he presents as especially shifty,
but because Lac has accrued a history of being taken advantage of by supposed
friends among the Yąnomamö. Plus, the duplicitousness, deception, and
disrespect are exacerbated in the wake of incidents of public humiliation, of
the sort he suffered a severe version of in Mömariböwei-teri. Every idiotic
move sets you back, not only regarding your projects but also your reputation.
Nevertheless, though Lac is wary of the young man, he decides to employ him as
a temporary stand-in for Rowahirawa. The kid is sharp and curious, seems mostly
genuine in his dealings with Lac so far, and he even speaks a little Spanish.

Lac finds no point in
checking his impulse to interrogate his young informant as they make the march
back to Bisaasi-teri. “Will Rowahirawa be finished with the unokaimou when we
get back?”

“Ma, he’ll have this many
days to go.” He holds up three fingers, meaning the ritual must last about a
week. That’s a long time to be separated from everyone, Lac thinks; they must
take the spilling of blood, the taking of life, seriously, their bombastic
eagerness notwithstanding.

“Owa, where are you from?
How did you come to be at the mission at Tama Tama?”

“I was born in Mömariböwei-teri.
I’ve been doing siohamou in Ora-teri”—Lower Bisaasi-teri, Lac thinks, which is
why I seldom cross paths with him. “The other white nabä took me to Tama Tama
once long ago, and I go back on occasion to hunt and see if I can get any
madohe. They gave me clothes but they were too big and I didn’t like them.”

“Did you learn to speak
Spanish there?”

“Awei, they sat us on
long flat logs and taught us to use white leaf bundles like the ones you’re
always drawing in. They talked all the time about a nabä who lived at the time
of Moonblood and was so good a healer that he was able to heal himself even
after being killed by warriors. They said he’s still here in the forest today,
but now he only heals souls. When I asked how he saves the souls from the
hekura and returns them to sick people, they said that’s not how this nabä
spirit heals their souls. Instead, he heals some wound we carry from one of our
ancestors. They said the hekura aren’t real. That’s when I knew you nabä are
crazy. We’ve all seen the hekura. The missionaries told me no one alive today
has seen the healer spirit in this way. They only feel him. He’s probably just
a hekura himself, tricking them into believing he’s the only one. It’s a
ridiculous trick too; no man I know of passed his wounds on to his sons.”

“Are the names you gave
me for the people of Mömariböwei-teri true? Or are they like the names I was
given in Bisaasi-teri?”

“Ma, Shaki, we gave you
the true names. I will only give you real names if you bring your madohe straight
to me.”

“Why didn’t you tell me
the Bisaasi-teri were playing a trick on me?”

“Because
if I had everyone would have been furious with me.”

“The
names of the Bisaasi-teri ancestors I showed you, you’re sure those are real
names?”

“Awei,
Shaki. I don’t know those people, but the names are good. They’re not funny
like the other names the Bisaasi-teri gave you.” But that doesn’t mean they’re
the names of the ancestors I’m trying to learn, Lac thinks. These legit-sounding
names mostly came from Kukumbrawa, the old man Lac interviewed all those times
in private, the one who went in for all the drama and tall tales. Hard to
imagine now, he thinks, that fellow has been my lone reliable informant.

“Owa,
has the Christian brother been to Lower Bisaasi-teri many times lately?”

“Ma,
he sends his motorista to ferry kids across the river. He gives them
sweet-tasting oatmeal, which they love, and he tells them to tell their fathers
to come to him for madohe. He says he’ll give them what they want for a little
help with his ohodemou—just like you, Shaki.”

“Do
the Bisaasi-teri go work for the brother then?”

“Awei,
some do. But they hate him, so the ones who go over there usually don’t go
back. They tell the rest of us to stay away too.”

“Why
do they hate him?”

“They
say he gets angry and threatens them. They say he never hands over the madohe
he promises because he’s always trying to get them to do one more thing.”

I know the type, Lac
thinks, never satisfied, always suspecting everyone is out to screw them. “Have
you gone to work for him?”

“Awei, I know the best
ways to do everything. I know how to find everything you may need. I always go
to find out about what new nabäs are doing. My uncles say there’s more of you showing
up in villages all the time, bringing more madohe, telling the Yąnomamö they
have to learn about their healer spirit who got killed but woke himself up.”

“Do many Yąnomamö want to
learn about this spirit?”

“Ma, they only pretend to
listen. The shabori say they’ve never encountered this spirit, so they wonder
why the white nabäs think he’s so important. It’s probably because nabäs don’t
know very many of the hekura.”

“I’ve never seen him
either,” Lac says. “And I agree with the Yąnomamö that most white nabäs are
wrong to assign him such importance. He’s one among many.”

“Shaki, why do you want
to put everyone’s names into your white leaves? Why do you want to know so much
about people’s lives and their ancestors?”

Lac explains that the way
the Yąnomamö live and think is much different from the way the nabäs he knows
live and think, and he’s fascinated with those differences. So he’s trying to
find out as much as he can about how each society came to be where it is now,
its people living the way they do. He hopes, he says, to one day be able to
explain why the nabä live one way and the Yąnomamö live an entirely different
way, thinking all the while it would be more accurate to say he’s hoping the
Yąnomamö shed light on the white nabäs’ distant past but not motivated enough
to go into such detail.

“Ah, Shaki,” Warotobowä
says, “I would like to know the answer to this question too, but why don’t you
take ebene and ask the hekura? They’ll tell you about the flood that washed
your ancestors away from this region. They’ll tell you why you and the other
nabäs are so strange, and then you’ll know how to live more like the Yąnomamö.”

Lac smiles.
Anthropologists are admonished to avoid ethnocentrism, but nothing stops their
subjects from believing their own culture superior, the norm from which any
deviation means degradation. No matter where you go, you find that people are
not so much interested in explaining what makes one society different from
another; people just want to know what the hell is wrong with anybody who’s not
like them. It must come natural to us humans. It’s only through disciplined
effort that we see past the bias.

“Shaki, where do your
supplies of madohe come from?”

“Owa, the villages where
nabäs like me come from are full of them. We all have ohodemou, many of us
building things to trade among ourselves, and since the villages are so big,
there are many many varieties of madohe for everyone to exchange.” Lac glances
over to see how the news affects his informant. How well does he understand the
concept of cities, whether dirt-road towns like Puerto Ayacucho or bustling
seedy metropolises like Caracas? What has he learned at the mission school,
besides that Jesus healed his own fatal wounds after his death?

They walk on in silence
along the elusive trail through the heavy dank air. Lac thinks of his censuses
and genealogies, chuckling quietly at the preposterousness of his predicament.
When he returns to Bisaasi-teri, he’ll seek out the old man who gave him all
those valid names, continue pressing back in time—because what else is he going
to do until Clemens comes back? Who knows if any of his charts are accurate, if
there’s any chance of him forging ahead and meeting with any success? He dreads
the conversation, or better yet the letter, in which he has to explain to Dr.
Nelson, a real doctor, why he’s abandoned the project he agreed to undertake.
He dreads the confirmation of his father’s and oldest brother’s dismissive
characterization of his chosen discipline. Most of all, he dreads going back to
the States, back to Ann Arbor, knowing he failed. So he determines to keep at
his work, see what he can find out, at least until Clemens arrives.

And what, Lac wonders,
will Clemens do to occupy his time in Bisaasi-teri? Does he walk around looking
for people who will listen to his speeches about Jesus? Right now, the
traditional myths remain dominant in the minds of young people like Warotobowä,
but in ten years that tradition will be vitiated beyond recognition. The
religion will be effectively lost—along with most of their other traditions.
How can you just walk away now, he asks himself, and let this opportunity
vanish? Ah, because the reality of learning about life in tribal society is far
removed from the notions you brought to the field. Because there’s still enough
time for someone else to do the work, to get the information, to make the
discoveries. But won’t that someone else at some point find himself right where
you are today? And won’t he be just as tempted to give up?

One foot in front of the
other, one name in the ledger after another—until you find yourself off the
trail, derided as a fool, and put back on course.

“Shaki,” one of the boys
calls out. “Why don’t you take the lead again?” Lac steps to the front of the
line amid their chortling, and his private thoughts are quickly subsumed by his
efforts to discern and keep to the path.

*****

Rowahirawa is in a rage.

Lac has been in his hut
all morning working with Kukumbrawa on his genealogies. Now it seems Rowahirawa
has completed the unokaimou. He’s returned to his father-in-law’s yahi. And
he’s pissed.

“Shoabe, why is my owa,
the sioha, so angry?” Lac asks Kukumbrawa as they jog alongside each other to
the shabono, Lac with his census graphs still in hand. But the old man doesn’t
seem to know; he says merely that the young man—the huya—is jealous. Upon
ducking into the shabono and stepping out into the plaza, they see Rowahirawa,
fresh from his week-long confinement with the two other unokais, facing off
with an older man. Lac moves closer and sees that it’s Rowahirawa’s
father-in-law he’s dressing down, the one trying to coax him into remaining
with his daughter in Bisaasi-teri by dangling before him the promise of a
second marriage to a younger daughter. As Lac listens to the tirade, he begins
to piece together the story behind his informant’s anger—and he can’t escape
the rush of relief from realizing it’s not him the rage is directed toward this
time.

Now Rowahirawa turns
toward another huya—a term Lac has been taking to mean something like hooligan
but is beginning to think refers to any male in his late teens. This guy is
trying his damnedest to appear unfazed by Rowahirawa’s insults and threats as
he timidly protests.

Lac doesn’t have to
listen long before he understands what’s set Rowahirawa off. “I was ready to
plant my garden outside,” he’d said to his father-in-law, but now he’s calling
this huya a coward for waiting until he was quarantined for the unokaimou
before arranging a tryst—a series of trysts—in the gardens with his wife’s
little sister. Lac has to resist openly chuckling. Everyone in the village has
stepped into the courtyard to bear witness to this latest flare-up. Finally,
someone else, Rowahirawa no less, is accepting his share of humiliation. He’s
not accepting it quietly though, not meekly laughing at himself and, hangdog,
saying, “Oh shucks, you guys, cut it out,” blotchy red from overheated
blushing.

Thus Lac begins to
understand how a Yąnomamö man secures his reputation as no one to be trifled
with, the same way he may need to start doing it himself. Now the young lover’s
father is running up to enter the fray, condemning Rowahirawa for his insults
and threats, standing up for the honor of his lineage. Looking around to gauge
to the level of concern on the villagers’ faces around him, Lac worries this
row will combust into a full-blown family feud, more so because Rowahirawa has
no family in Bisaasi-teri but is too incensed to back down. Instead, he
challenges both father and son to a club fight.

“Get your himos!” he
demands, referring to the longer clubs, the ones with an edge, the more
dangerous ones. “You can each have a turn before I take mine.”

Not only does he show no
fear; he seems desperate for them to strike the first blows as he chases them
back, jutting his head out with his hands down at his sides, all but begging
for a new set of perpetually livid scars he can display through his tonsure,
that window onto the violence of his past which serves as a warning of his
current propensity.

Lac grips his charts
tight. He’d be more worried for his friend if the two men weren’t so patently
intimidated; it’s as though Rowahirawa is transferring his humiliation onto
them, with a vengeance. First the father and then the young lover—if such a
term applies—hunches down and cants his body to avoid squaring shoulders, just
perceptibly. You can see, even as they complain about their mistreatment,
neither will step up to deliver the blow Rowahirawa is demanding. This will be
to their lasting disgrace, proof in everyone’s mind of their cowardice. Lac
will have to keep an eye out for how this diminishment affects their standing.
For now, Rowahirawa is still full of rancor. Who will he direct it toward next?
How will he sate his urge to violence? He turns from the two men, all contempt.
As he steps away, the father shouts one last bit of defiant invective.

Rowahirawa whips back
around. “Did you change your mind about fighting me, Makorowiwa? Then forget
himos. I’ll bury an ax in your filthy forehead and then your son can screw my
little sister-in-law all he wants while I go through the unokaimou again. When
I’m done I’ll bury an ax in his head too.” The man goes rigid with impotent
rage. Rowahirawa turns away again and starts huffing toward the passage out of
the shabono as Lac, stunned, recovers his wits and riffles wildly through the
pages in his hand. Rowahirawa just said the man’s name aloud, in the center of
the courtyard, for nearly everyone in the village to hear. And it’s not the
name Lac has in his charts.

The name Lac has came from
Kukumbrawa. The old man is still giving him false names.

With both hands, Lac
lifts the stack of pages over his head, making ready to throw them in the dirt,
but a thought makes him hesitate. After holding the charts suspended for two
beats, he comes to a decision and, pages still in hand, rushes off after
Rowahirawa. He finds him pacing between the entrance passage and the edge of
the garden. “Come inside my hut,” Lac says.

“Shaki, I’m leaving
Bisaasi-teri first thing tomorrow. The people here, they’re all liars and
cowards and weak and pathetic. The women all have saggy butt cheeks and pocked,
greasy foreheads. And I barely learn anything about the hekura from these
incompetent shaboris who let child after child die as their souls are dragged
away and devoured.”

As they step indoors, Lac
takes a moment to be grateful Rowahirawa hasn’t smashed anything in his hut
yet. “Shori, you called that man by his name, the huya’s father. Why is it a
different name than I got from the old man?”

“Shaki, you idiot. Will
you never learn? Everyone knows the old man is giving you fake names—they’d be
angry with him if he weren’t. And I didn’t call him by his name; that would be
too nice. I called him by his dead father’s name. Come with me back to
Karohi-teri and I’ll give you the real names of everyone here.”

“Ma, Shori, I’m waiting
for the bald missionary to return so I can bring my family to live with me, but
if you stay and give me the names I need, we can start traveling to every
village you’ve ever heard of. You’ll surely find better wives and better
shabori teachers in one of them. And one day you’ll surely be the one who truly
lives here, wherever it is you decide to live.”

*****

“I would have been back
sooner,” Chuck says as they sit across from each other on nice wooden chairs
outside the hut Lac has been helping to restore to habitability. “The Salesians
have been dogging us at every turn. We had to pay up for enough licenses and
permits and official letters to set us on course to burning through most of the
funds we raised before I set foot in a single shabono.”

Lac wonders if he should
tell Chuck about Padre Morello’s interest in his dictionary, but decides he
lacks the certainty he’d need to make such an accusation. Chuck looks tired but
hale, like he’s been absorbing some of the heartiness that’s been leaking out
from Lac’s pores into rapidly evaporating puddles on the jungle floor.

“It seems the Catholics
have talked to every pilot who flies in and out of Esmeralda,” Chuck goes on, “telling
them about a host of favors they can count on if they help keep all the
Protestant missionaries out of the region. We had to bring in some friends from
Caracas to fly us in. And the priest who lives with the Ye’kwana near the
airstrip was not at all happy to see us landing.”

Great, Lac thinks, that
means I have to watch what I say so I can keep the padre and the other Salesians
on my side. They can make life pretty damned difficult for a fieldworker if
they decide to. Staying in the good graces of both missionary groups is going
to take some finesse.

“The only good thing
about it,” Chuck goes on, “is that the rivalry is energizing people at the
church back in the States. After the newsletter went out and people read an
article I wrote about our problems with the Caracas bureaucracy, we started
receiving more donations than ever. The New Tribes is determined not to lose
Bisaasi-teri the way they lost Mahekodo-teri and Iyäwei-teri.”

“I hate to tell you then
that the Salesians have already started moving in across the river. So far,
they’ve been concentrating their efforts on Lower Bisaasi-teri—maybe because
they want to keep their methods secret from someone like me—and from what I
hear they aren’t having much success getting people to come stay with them.”

“Yes, we found out about
the new compound over by the old Malarialogìa hut.” He chuckles. “Your face
that first day I brought you out here—I can’t imagine showing up for the first
time right after a fight like that. Anyway, me and Judy are going to stay here
as much as we can, and we have another couple coming from Canada in two weeks
to stay at Lower Bisaasi-teri.”

Ah, Lac thinks, so I’ll have
to relocate to another village if I want to study Yąnomamö with minimal contact
to the outside world. But if I travel farther inland from the Orinoco, getting
Laura and the kids in will be that much harder—impossible really.

You’re going to have to
decide what your priority is.

“So you said you found a
way to get the names you wanted—after your little setback.” Chuck shakes his
head, unable to conceal his grin. “How did you do it?”

“It was staring me in the
face,” Lac says, savoring the English words on his tongue, rolling them out
with effortless precision, as though his mouth had a mind of its own, one in
perfect sync with the mind hosting his consciousness of the world around him.
“I was so dead-set on following the kinship gradient I’d discovered early in my
stay, working from the assumption that relatives would know the most about
their closest family members, and would therefore be able to give me the most
accurate information. But that approach kept running headlong into the logic of
their name-avoidance practices. Close kin, especially those who are recently
deceased, are the people you refuse to name the most vehemently. What I
realized—and it was just last week—is that the only way to get a bunch of good
names is to start with the most distant relatives or people not related at all.
Or better yet start with enemies. If you want the names of people in
Iyäwei-teri, you ask someone from Mahekodo-teri. The best source of names in
Bisaasi-teri is a man from Karohi-teri doing bride service for his
father-in-law, a young man who happens to be disgruntled about not receiving a
second wife he was promised. I still have a lot of cross-checking and
corroboration to do before I can claim any success cleaning up the mess I
discovered in Mömariböwei-teri, but I have names for everyone in Upper
Bisaasi-teri, everyone in Mömariböwei-teri, and I have a good start on the
census for Lower Bisaasi-teri. The genealogies are a trickier matter, but I’ll
keep poking around. The longer I’m with the Yąnomamö, the more options and
opportunities seem to pop up.”

“That’s truly
remarkable,” Chuck says. “You sure set yourself a difficult task in collecting
all their names. Honestly, I only know the names of a few of them who are close
to the mission—thought I knew them anyway. Well, and a bunch of kids I suppose,
but we often give the children biblical names so they can be entered into
official records. We’re not nearly as proficient at it as the Salesians
though.”

“Yes, I’ve noticed the
priest at Ocamo calls the men he hires from Iyäwei-teri by Christian-sounding
names. I called my main informant Pedro for a while, just because I had to call
him something and I didn’t want to piss him off. It’s funny, now that he’s
hanging his hammock in my hut because he’s too mad at his father-in-law to stay
in his yahi, he’s started calling me aîwä—older brother. So I’m obliged to
call him owa. As hard as it is for me to follow all the conventions, it must be
even more delicate a balance for people in your and the padre’s positions to
have to strike: showing respect for their culture while trying to pave their
way into civilization.” Worried his attempt at sympathy may come across as a
rebuke, Lac adds, “For me, it’s simpler, at least in that regard. I only care
about their culture. Well—I should say I’m only interested in their culture for
my work. I definitely worry about more than that though, as I see the outside
world encroaching.”

Both men fall silent,
pondering the potential fates they have some undetermined role in bringing
about for the people whose disruptive existence was the cause of their separate
voyages into this all-devouring jungle. What on earth are we doing here? Lac
imagines Chuck must be consumed by that same mystery. Clemens is developing a
program to help Yąnomamö children learn Spanish, not, as Morello seemed to
think, composing a dictionary. As they discuss this project now, Lac thinks
back to when Clemens gave him a single page of Yąnomamö terms and phrases, just
before they left Tama Tama to motor up the final stretch of the Orinoco until
reaching the mouth of the Mavaca. That was when he should have noted the first
sign of trouble: a single Yąnomamö word translates as name, as in “to name
someone,” and as insult. At the time, the implication that you can’t name
someone without insulting him was lost on Lac.

“How long will you stay
in Bisaasi-teri?” Lac asks.

Continuing their
conversation about each other’s work, they’ve stepped inside the hut Lac built
his own to share a wall with, forming a right-angled, thatched-roof duplex of
sorts. “I’ll stay as long as I can,” Chuck says. “That’s why I’m having Judy
and Tricia come to live here with me. The more of a presence we can sustain,
the better chance we’ll have of preventing the Salesians from establishing a
stronger foothold.”

“I think I’m going to
bring my family here too; I’ll feel much better about them living in the
territory knowing you’re here. But first I have some traveling to do. I want to
see how well my name-collection system works on a larger scale, moving from
village to village. If I could get village histories tracking their origins and
migrations even back just a few generations, the scientific value….” He trails
off. “But there are also some villages I just feel like I need to see. The
people here talk of an immense village near the headwaters of the Mavaca. They
call it Mishimishimaböwei-teri. But I have to go somewhere else first. I need
to go to Patanowä-teri.”

*****

“Where did the old man
get all these names? They sound like true names.”

“Nobody in Bisaasi-teri
would recognize these names, Aîwä. I alone possess true knowledge of the
village where these people live. That’s why the old man used their names. No
one here would know the man whose name was spoken and get angry.”

“What is this village?
Can we travel there?”

“Awei, Shaki, it’s a long
ways in that direction”—east—“but we could journey to Iyäwei-teri and stay
there a night before heading to the Höräta River;
that’s where we’ll find Makorima-teri. With your noisy boat, we may even be
able to reach it in the wet season.”

“Owa, why do so many Yąnomamö
fear that someone will get angry if it becomes known they are giving me names?
You say the names I got from Mömariböwei-teri are true, but no one got angry
about people sharing them.”

Rowahirawa sighs. It’s midday.
The heat swaddles them in their hammocks as they sway and rock within the
shadowy dank air of his hut, where they’ve come to escape it. “Each man has to
make his own decision about whether he wants madohe more or if he wants to get
angry more. If you say a man’s father’s name, he has no choice. But if you
whisper the name of a neighbor, he may decide he likes his machete.”

“I don’t understand. The Mömariböwei-teri
know I have all their names now, and no one got angry as far as I know. Do men
get angry at each other for sharing their names a lot? Why are people so frightened?”

“Each man decides what he
wants, but you can never be sure what other men will decide. That’s why some
are scared. In Mömariböwei-teri, the patas discussed the matter for the whole
village when they heard you were trading tools for names. They consulted with
their hekura. They agreed they wouldn’t get angry before you got there. Still,
you have to be careful. Sometimes, men get angry and they can’t help it. Like
me, when I get angry, I can’t decide not to be angry anymore. I’m just angry.”

Lac thinks he
understands. He wonders whether he’ll get them all to be more forthcoming with
time—all the ones who know him—or of him
anyway. He may have to start all over again in more distant villages. Really
though since his earliest days in Bisaasi-teri, it’s seemed as though people
had already heard of him whenever he showed up at a new shabono. Tidings and
gossip travel fast from village to village. “Owa,” he says, “I’m going to
travel to many villages soon, and I want to go first to Patanowä-teri. Will it
be safe for me to go to this village, or will they think I’m a Bisaasi-teri?”

Lac rolls on his side to
see Rowahirawa smile his goofy, big-toothed smile. “Ma, Shaki, you are truly
crazy. The Patanowä-teri will not think you’re a Bisaasi-teri, but you shouldn’t
go there anyway. It will anger the patas here that you’re taking your madohe
somewhere else. Plus, the trails will be flooded and your every step will land
on a snake.”

“Awei, but I must go
there. I must go to many villages. I’ll even go to Mishimishimaböwei-teri if I
can. I hope you’ll come with me.”

“Maybe I will go with you
to Mishimishimaböwei-teri. You will definitely need a lot of help to get
there—and even more help once you’ve arrived.”

*****

“Brother Marteens has
done a… satisfactory job setting the groundwork for the outpost at Boca
Mavaca,” Padre Morello says as they enter his office at Ocamo and find their
respective chairs. Lac loves these chairs, and he still finds the padre’s voice
a comfort. He has a series of evasions in mind should the topic of Clemens’s
notional dictionary come up, but so far it seems Morello has returned to his
usual, genial self, leaving Lac to wonder how trustworthy his recollection of
the earlier encounter is. “It’s come along well, and now we’re ready for a
priest to reside there. We’ll be having Brother Marteens apply his skills
elsewhere, while Padre Sanchez takes over at Mavaca.”

Lac merely inquired after
the mission’s progress, but from this reply he gets the impression Morello
expects the news of Marteens departure to please him. What has Marteens told
the padre, Lac wonders, and why should he think I have any animus toward this
one Salesian, preferring any other missionary as a neighbor across the Orinoco?
Or has Marteens been up to something Morello mistakenly assumes I’m aware of?

It’s a single suspicious
moment in an otherwise fine conversation. Padre Morello, an amateur
photographer, is planning a book about his time with the Yąnomamö, and he’s
told Lac of his need for quality photos from “real life in the villages.” Lac
has come downriver to offer him access to his haul of 35-millimeter pictures,
not quid pro quo, but simply as a favor. Lac assures himself he’d proffer them
regardless—but he does want something.

“We’ve got lots of
company at Mavaca now already,” Lac says, silently warning himself to tread
carefully—you don’t want either side to start thinking of you as their spy, and
you definitely don’t want them to suspect you of spying for their rivals. “You’ve
probably heard about the arrival of the Canadian husband-and-wife team taking
up in Lower Bisaasi-teri?” Not waiting for a response, he interjects the crux:
“So I figure conditions will be adequately safe for me to bring my own wife and
children in to live with me outside the village. I’ve planned some river
voyages that will keep me busy for much of the remaining wet season, and I’d
like to visit Patanowä-teri if I can manage it—though my Yąnomamö friends warn
me against any attempt. I’m thinking I’d like to fly my family in sometime in
November, giving me plenty of time to look after them as I make my final
preparations for my colleagues’ arrival in March. Dr. Nelson and his team will
be doing medical tests and taking samples for genetics research. It should be
an exciting project. But, Padre, I’m wondering if you could help me arrange a
flight out of Esmeralda to Caracas, and then another flight back for me and my
family, maybe a couple weeks later?”

The padre smiles. “Of
course,” he says, genuinely delighted by the opportunity to be of assistance.
Lac waits half a second for a counter-request, wondering if he should have
offered the photos after asking for
the favor instead of before. “She must miss you terribly, and I understand the
loneliness one feels while living among a strange people, deep in the jungle,
cut off from everything he knows. Having your wife with you will be so good for
your spirits. Yes, I’ll set up the flights in and out. We’ll start working out
the details in the morning.”

Same old Padre Morello, not
angling for any favors, no dictionaries or kids’ language training materials,
but simply glad to be of service to a fellow fieldworker, one of the few
civilized men he has opportunity to converse with on this lonely frontier. The
padre goes on to speak of past examples of missionaries who brought their
families into Amazonia without catastrophe. None, Lac notes, were living among
the Yąnomamö. “And then,” Morello says, “there are the young men”—white huyas,
Lac thinks—“who come out here and completely lose their bearings.” His friendly
eyes fold into a glower. “You can understand the temptation, I’m sure, Dr.
Shackely. You know how it could separate a youth from his insufficiently
steadfast resolve.”

Lac nearly interrupts to
explain Yąnomamö women have never been an overly enticing lure to him, making
the concealed hook of sin easy to evade, however many dreams he has in the
early morning hours about liaisons with Laura, and others; it’s in fact this
indifference that pricks his conscience, hinting as it does at a divide he’s
still making in his mind between his own kind and theirs. But he intuits the
padre must be referring to a specific man, someone causing him trouble, perhaps
threatening the reputation of the Salesians in the territory more generally. So
instead he says, “People do lose their minds out here, as you say because
they’re cut off, surrounded by people who are wildly different from them. I
hold out hope that those minds can be fully restored, but I admit that remains
to be seen.” The padre’s fancy diction is having its usual effect on Lac’s own.
“I only worry,” he goes on, “that it will be difficult to keep everyone safe.”
Kara and Dominic could be bitten by poisonous snakes. Laura could be…

“You’ll be happy to hear
then,” the padre says, “that the priest at Mavaca will be equipped with a
shortwave radio like the one I have here. Which reminds me: you’ll be wanting
to speak to your wife, perhaps share with her the good news about your visit in
a few months. It’s almost time for my evening call to the main mission outpost;
I’ll see if I can’t patch you through to your wife’s apartment at IVIC.”

*****

“I’ll be able to help
with your research,” Laura says through the static, her sentence like a hissing
wick finally detonating in an explosive squawk from the speakers.

“It’s a strange place,
Honey,” he responds, reaching for the dials, inexplicably taciturn. “I think
you’ll probably have to spend most of your time watching the kids, making sure
they don’t get lifted off into the sky by the bugs.” Suddenly, his English
feels clumsy. Why downplay the risks at this point, he asks himself, when
you’ll need to alert her to them all later anyway?

“Lachlan, you’re missing half the culture.”

“Ha! I bet at this point
I’m still missing far more than that.”

“No, I’m talking about
the women. I can spend time with them while you’re with the men, chanting and
hunting and doing whatever else they do. Maybe they’ll be more open with me.
Maybe they’ll even be easier to get some names from.” Like Mead and Bateson, Lac
thinks, that ill-fated couple, but the Shackleys could be different.

“Well, that would be a
welcome development,” he says. She’s antsy, he thinks, lonely and bored half
out of her mind. It was a huge sacrifice on her part, agreeing to all this. You
owe her your best effort at making the experience in some measure fulfilling.
“I’ll show you the basics of how to fill in the charts. It would be good to
have another source of corroboration for the names I have, but if you can help
with the names of dead ancestors, well, then I just may have to figure out a
way to bring you along to every village I travel to.”

Their time to luxuriate
in each other’s airily mediated voices is ticking away, and Lac, at a loss,
lingers longingly over this last point, listening for her response with the
foreknowledge of the ache that will come as soon as he signs off. Some career
you’ve chosen, he whispers to himself. Laura tells him about how the kids are
healthy but in need of other children to play with. Will the Yąnomamö children
make for good playmates? The thought of Dominic with a miniature bow, chasing a
bee with a string trailing behind it, swells his heart. Then he thinks of Kara,
of her tending to anyone younger than herself, and in turn being tended to by
anyone older. Laura is right about him not being nearly as familiar with the
distaff portion of the village; he has a much harder time envisioning what life
will be like in Bisaasi-teri for his little girl.

And what will it be like
for Laura?

She’ll have two
English-speaking families to visit, along with a priest he hasn’t met, and
she’ll be able to occupy herself by taking part in his work, collecting
information from female sources. He’ll have to help her learn the language,
even though he’s far from having mastered it himself. Indeed, there’s a
gradient of linguistic aptitude among the Yąnomamö themselves. As of now, he’s
much closer to the idiotically inarticulate end of the spectrum. Maybe Laura
will quickly surpass him. Maybe she’ll be the one coaching him. If so, he would
welcome the guidance. However much she thrives in the role of amateur
anthropologist, she’ll never be able to travel to other villages without a
well-armed male chaperone. She’ll still need him for that. Lac fantasizes about
having her in the field, about them both fulfilling their complementary roles,
her tending the hearth fire in Bisaasi-teri, acquiring deep knowledge of the
cultural intricacies, him journeying from village to village, recording a more
global history of intervillage politics and population dispersals.

“Laura, I know what
you’re giving up for me now, what you must be going through. I know I’ve left
you in circumstances that are… less than ideal. I just want you to know how
much I appreciate it, and that I plan to devote much of my life in the coming
years to making it up to you.”

“Lachlan, neither of us
could have known what it would be like. I’m making do, me and the kids. Make it
up to us by doing great work. Write the best damned ethnography that’s ever
been written. Be the best damned anthropologist who’s ever lived.”

He lets her hear his
forced laugh. “I’ll do my best,” he says, adding silently in his head—if I
don’t get killed.

*****

The thing about
Patanowä-teri, he writes to Ken, is that while everyone on the outside is
afraid of its inhabitants, telling stories of their unparalleled fierceness,
people on the inside are scared to death of attacks from everyone on the
outside. When I arrived (on my third attempt), the men were involved in a
project to clear the area surrounding their immense shabono of any and all
trees and brush, so raiders would have nowhere to conceal themselves if they
attacked. They worked diligently—and I can tell you the Yąnomamö don’t work at
all if they can avoid it—and the whole time they were on full alert.

As the handful of men
cleared the brush and chopped down the trees, at least three others were standing
guard with ready bows. When the women went out to the stream with their
hollowed-out gourds, the men protecting them walked in a crouch, their arrows
nocked and partly drawn back, their eyes open so big they looked like prowling bush
babies.

Lac lifts his pen and
marvels at how the Bisaasi-teri raiding party managed to ambush a man from such
a vigilant group—even though one member of that party was shot through the
chest, and at least one other would have been shot as well had it not been for
Lac’s bumbling antics. Should he tell Ken how he got the wounded Monou-teri man
to drink some water, and how it probably saved his life?

He sets his pen back
down, writing, I was granted access to “the one who truly lives here,” and I
presented him with both an ax and a machete, telling him I would bring much
more on future visits. He has a big personality, this headman, loves to tell
stories, acting them out with dramatic flourishes, and constantly pausing to
ask, “Do you know what happened next?” or “Do you know what I did next?” But he
too, truly living though he may be, was nervy as hell, barking orders at other
men in a way I’ve never seen a Yąnomamö do.

The villagers seldom
defer to their headman’s authority; any leading must be accomplished with the
lightest of touches. The people in every village I’ve been to use the same
phrase, “the one who truly lives here,” to refer to the headman, and they put
special emphasis on the “truly” to stress the starkness of the distinction. But
there’s no single word for a leader. I’ve been using pata to refer to them
because it means something like “politically prominent man,” similar to the
word browähäwä, but I’ve come to realize this latter connotes more of an
ambition after prominence on the part of younger men, whereas patas are already
established.

Rowahirawa tells me the
best way to identify the headman of any village is to watch for which pata
visitors go to when they arrive to trade. All the visitors to Bisaasi-teri, for
instance, go straight to Mobaräkäwa (whom I’ve been calling Bahikoawa). And in
Patanowä-teri I was brought first to Kreihisewa, after a tense approach and an
even tenser entrance.

Lac pauses again in his
writing, remembering how marching into the plaza and striking the visitor’s
pose felt like turning himself in to the police. I’ve done something horrible,
he may as well have said, or at least I think I may have. So I put myself in
your hands, at your mercy. Let’s see if we can’t sort this whole thing out.

Convention
called for him to stare blankly over the top edge of the shabono’s thatching,
into the billowing green conflagration of foliage festooned with daubed chains
of cottony cloud. And stare he did, even though he wanted desperately to scan
the plaza for the man he’d lunged at and sent over the edge of the bluff—the
bluff he’d see now looming over the village if he turned and looked over his
shoulder. He conjures an image of the man’s face in his mind. It seems so
vivid, he thinks, but if I came face-to-face with him now, would I even
recognize him?

It was the same deal as
in the other villages he’s visited: he had a rough census with most of the
people’s names before arriving; now he needed a Polaroid and a 35-millimeter
photo of everyone. Patanowä-teri is home to over two hundred people though, so taking
the time to get a census of any other village from them might have put him
behind schedule. All he could think of as he stood in the pose, and later as he
moved from yahi to yahi going over his list of names, was that one of those
names belonged to the man who knows he was there the day the Bisaasi-teri and
Monou-teri staged their joint raid, who knew that he’d not only been present
but had participated—or rather, interfered. Yes, one of the names on his list
must belong to this man—unless that man had been killed.

Lac had, after all,
shoved him down a steep embankment, into the path of the band of retreating
raiders. It’s entirely possible they killed him, meaning he wouldn’t be telling
anyone what Lac had done, meaning Rowahirawa is the only one who knows. And
does Rowahirawa even know about the tackle? Had he crossed paths with the
doomed man on the cliff face? No, he couldn’t have. He only went through the
unokaimou ceremony for a single killing, and then there’s the fact that no one
else from the raiding party claimed to have killed anyone at the bluff. No,
there were only the two killings, meaning the man who knows what he did is
still here.

Every mock lunge Lac
expected to be sincerely fatal. He stared out over the trees, thinking of the
intricate abundance of life, the layered complexity and staggering copiousness
of details and processes awaiting discovery, more than any one hundred minds
could hold, however immanently graspable they individually seem. If the world
can be seen in a grain of sand, think of the entire cosmos of interlocking
cycles and nutrient chains and chemical bonds in every square inch of the
forest canopy. Even the ants have stories to tell, and stories to be deduced, of
how the species evolved, what its ancestors looked like, why it behaves the way
it does, individual variation—do ants have personalities?—their roles within
the group established through some basic biochemical mechanism. Never in his
life had Lac looked so intently into a distant swatch of foliage, so doggedly
brought to life in the theater of his mind the epic story of pismire prehistory
alongside the smaller scale dramas of the workers’ daily lives.

Lac wasn’t attacked. He
stood long enough for the entrance ceremony to come to its next stage, when Kreihisewa
came to guide him to his family’s yahi, where an empty hammock awaited. He lay
in the visitor’s repose, trying not to think of all the stories he’d heard of
nomohori, dirty tricks, where hosts lulled their guests into dropping their
guards and then hacked into their skulls with some worn-down nabä tool. Then
came the sweet and chalky date—if there’s any difference in recipe from village
to village, his palette lacks the refinement to discern it—and then it was time
for him to present his gifts of madohe.

Getting back to
Patanowä-teri hadn’t been easy. Rowahirawa balked at the idea of going with
him, probably with good reason. Most of the other Bisaasi-teri insisted he was
insane to travel over ground during the wet season, and he had indeed had to
journey far out of his way to find a dry, relatively safe route. Now here he
was, ready to do his work. The headman was helpful, but things didn’t go quite
as smoothly as they had in Mömariböwei-teri, mostly because there were so many
more people. But he proceeded. When you feel this alone and out-of-place, you
latch on to anything that offers a clear sense of what you should do next. He
proceeded, and all the while he had no plan for how he’d respond to coming
across the man he sent tumbling down the cliff face.

Rowahirawa wasn’t there
to guide him or watch out for him. Instead, he’d relied on two huyas with
relatives in Patanowä-teri as guides. These two had sat out the raid, and
unless Rowahirawa had told them, knew nothing of the inappropriately outsized
role Lac had played. Still, lots could have gone wrong. An inwardly pulling
throb of vibrating collapse took up residence in his chest and spread to his
arms and to his head. His voice was brittle and creaky. His eyes were dry yet
leaky, irritated by the softest breezes. He explained his goals and methods to Kreihisewa,
who shouted a summary to everyone who had gathered to prod and pinch and gawp
at the nabä with hair the “color of overripe bananas.” He insisted, in a way
few headmen would insist for fear of embarrassing incidents of defiance, that
they all cooperate.

Lac worried that the
tension of anticipating enemy raids would conduce to shorter fuses. Only an
insane person would go about asking after names at a time like this. Only an
insane person, for that matter, would attempt to reach Patanowä-teri from
Bisaasi-teri in the height of the wet season. The Bisaasi-teri had said as
much. But he did both. A large contingent of one of the two main lineages refused
to listen to Lac go down his list of names, and refused still more adamantly to
give him any others. He considered petitioning the headman to exercise some
authority on his behalf, but decided against it. This will only be a first pass,
he figured; he’ll return to this village again, he’s sure. It stands as a
unique sample, larger than any village he’s yet seen, and embattled like no
other he’s heard of. Better for the people who opt out to witness their
neighbors enjoying the fruits of their cooperation, later observing nary an
evil consequence befalling those whose names he checks off. The objectors will
come around. Trying to coerce them into providing information would likely
redound to its own evil effect.

Lac wrapped up his first
day sitting in a hammock, listening to Kreihisewa tell, or more precisely
reenact his stories. He couldn’t help comparing this man’s charisma to, of all
people’s, Padre Morello’s, who Lac supposes is a sort of big man in his own
right. Kreihisewa is a kinetic dynamo of a raconteur, like someone hired to act
out a one-man theatrical production for a class of kindergartners. At key
points, he’d lean close to Lac’s ear, splashing tobacco-steeped spittle on his
cheek. But there was something in his intensity, in the graceful occupation of
the role he was making up for himself as he went, in the fine-grained nature of
the attention he directed toward his audience—all of which reminded him of
Morello. The only difference was that Morello would demur from
self-aggrandizement, prizing humility after the Western fashion. Even the
undercurrent of potential and thoroughgoing disreputability was there. It made
Lac wonder if it might be possible to arrange a meeting.

Maybe, if Lac were to
listen closely as such a meeting took place, he’d be able to channel some of
those undercurrents to the surface. He’s stopped writing. Looking back at the
page before him, he tries to work out the ramifications of complete
forthrightness. Ken wouldn’t rat him out to anyone; they’re friends. Plus, if
Lac simply explained the situation… But sending it in a letter would mean
leaving a written record, physical evidence. Of what, though, he counters,
considering I didn’t kill anyone? If the man he’d pushed down the cliff had met
his demise, he would have come across this detail in his interviews—unless the
man was from the faction that chose not to participate.

Lac sighs. The topic
exhausts him, but his thoughts hoist it up and heave it to the front of his
mind with the relentless fervor of hopeful determination, as if by thinking about
it hard enough he just may be able to change what happened. Change what he did.
He goes back to writing about the Patanowä-teri headman, leaving out any
mention of his earlier visit to the village. Wrapping up his description, with
an inch and a half left at the bottom of the page, Lac turns to the topic of
his next trip.

I’m disappointed, he
writes, to still be in Bisaasi-teri, a village that has been in sustained
contact with the New Tribes for over a decade. The place is lousy with
missionaries of every stripe: the Canadian counterparts to the Clemens family
across the Mavaca in Lower Bisaasi-teri, the Catholic priest who’s recently
arrived to replace the Dutch lay brother in the burgeoning compound across the
Orinoco, and of course Clemens himself, who’s been coming and going between
here and Tama Tama to prepare for the arrival of his wife and daughter. He’s
got the outhouse working again. I helped him build a chicken coup. He’s
basically setting up a one-family farm for their extended stays.

Already, young men from
the village are showing up asking me to confirm—or more often to debunk—this or
that element of the Jesus story. What the hell do you tell them? That nearly
all your fellow white nabäs suffer from some bizarre delusion, one that piggybacks
on their capacity for guilt as much as their paralyzing fear of death? “Us
white nabäs have our own hekura we speak to and call to inhabit our chests.
Their stories are much different, but they’re really the same kind of hekura
the Yąnomamö know”—though the nabäs would be loath to admit any such thing.

My plan has always been
to stay with the Bisaasi-teri long enough to learn the language and the basics
of the culture and then relocate to a village farther removed, one whose
contact with the missionaries has been minimal, one whose people have never
heard of Jesus. Rowahirawa has been telling me about a place that sounds
perfect, a village called Mishimishimaböwei-teri, which is located near the
headwaters of the Mavaca. He says it’s much bigger than Patanowä-teri, which
would make it the biggest I’ve heard anyone speak of. I want to reach it while
the river is still high. I won’t be able to stay long on my first explorative mission,
but I hope to make contact and lay the groundwork for future visits.

He’s on to the next page
now, a whole series of lines to fill with his dashes of ink, with scribbled
conjectures about this undiscovered group running wild in the wilderness. Ah,
but it’s not the kind of wildness you might have hoped for, he resists writing
to his friend, not the wildness conducive to adventure, but a wildness far more
frightening. He leans back in his chair, already rickety—it’s the humidity that
wrecks them—and looks around at the cluttered and moldy interior of his hut.
Lately, despite all the villages he’s been traveling to, it seems like he’s always
in this damned hut, or in some shabono’s plaza, or in some yahi trying to parse
some overly exuberant man’s tobacco-distorted words, pen and paper in hand.
Kennedy talked of going to the moon. Humans have spread from Africa to blanket
the globe with their quickly tainted tabula rasa of colorless concrete,
migrating farther than any other terrestrial species—except for the ones they
brought with them. Yet individually we spend our lives occupying such small
ranges, making the same routine circuits over and over: work, home, store,
maybe a nice restaurant one night a week, blind to the seasons and the racing
away of year after year, dumped unceremoniously into our futures, left to
wonder: How did we get so old?

Here in the jungle it’s
not so different. I’m always here, he thinks, writing or making food or cleaning
up after making food or listening to some crazy old man prattle on endlessly
about the huyas he’s killed or the wives he’s enjoyed and then passed along to
his little brother—a kinship category which also includes cross-cousins, Lac
has discovered. I’m always here, or else I’m in one of the shabono courtyards,
variously avoiding beggars and badgering reluctant informants. Or else I’m
walking, days on end, with an eye to the ground for snakes, trying to see the
bent twigs signaling the arbitrary meanderings of the so-called trail.

Only so many hours fit
into each day—staying productive and avoiding wasted time is a matter of
prioritization at its most ruthless. When he was a kid in Port Austin, he would
look at the sunrays streaming through high billowing clouds over Lake Michigan
and bask in the radiance of his gilded future. Every shimmering promise and
prisming dream awaiting its fruition somewhere along the infinite span of heartily
bloated seasons stretching over the horizon. Now it’s this sweaty, gnat-bitten
grind unto the end of his overstretched days, grueling journeys and tedious
paperwork, minute by minute, for the rest of his life.

He needs to get out of
the field. He needs to see his family, and the ocean, and the familiar
landmarks, roadways, buildings, and sidewalks of Ann Arbor.

Before any of that,
though, he needs to find this place called Mishimishimaböwei-teri. But first he
has to check on something. He has to make sure Rowahirawa is the one telling
him the truth about the names. So his next move will be to motor his dugout to
Ocamo, and from there voyage to the Höräta River, where he’ll find
Makorima-teri, the village where the people whose names Kukumbrawa has been
giving him live, if the allegations are true.